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James, Sr. Computer Support Expert

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Question about preparing a computer cold spare.
I have a

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Question about preparing a computer cold spare.

I have a computer running Windows Server 2008. It hosts all of the shared files for my company. I already have it set up with 2 hard drives running RAID 1 mirroring so if one drive dies, we are fine. However, I am worried about a scenario where other hardware stops working (such as CPU, motherboard, RAM, etc) and we have a long downtime while I repair this critical computer. I was thinking of buying a cold spare that would stand-by. If the primary computer were to fail, I would unplug the hard drives from the primary, put them into the cold spare and then be up and running.

I know one thing I have to be careful is if my cold spare has substantially different hardware than my primary. I believe if the hardware is different, putting the drives from the primary into the cold spare may result in driver differences and result in a blue screen when booting. So, let's say I buy a computer acting as my cold spare that is 100% identical in hardware to my primary computer. For the cold spare, I would also configure the BIOS to run the hard drives as RAID. If I do this, would my solution work? In the event of primary computer failure, I can remove the hard drives, put them into the cold spare, turn on the cold spare and be up and running again with down time of just the time it takes to swap the drives and turn on the cold spare?

Ok - so this is a hardware RAID.This means you need to be using the exact same hardware, with the exact same RAID controller for the cold spare.

Your best bet is basically to get the exact same server, exact same board and components. You are correct in assuming that if you have different components, your OS will fail on boot due to incorrect drivers. The RAID controller is the most sensitive part in this case.

Hope this makes sense!

If you have any other questions or need more information, please ask me – I’ll be happy to respond!I'd appreciate it if you can rate my service using the faces below my answer.

What is my hardware RAID controller tied to? Is it the motherboard? Meaning, to ensure the RAID controller is the same on the primary and the cold spare, I need to make sure the XXX hardware is the same on both primary and cold spare.

No - the CPU is not going to make a difference just because of the speed. Windows uses the same driver for the entire CPU class, regardless of the speed. It would matter if you used an AMD instead of Intel, changed the number of cores, etc.

If you have any other questions or need more information, please ask me – I’ll be happy to respond!I'd appreciate it if you can rate my service using the faces below my answer.

These CPUs will have two different socket types on the board, which means different boards... I can't say for sure it will work - if the socket is different there can be other components that are different, including the RAID controller.To be on the safe side, I would stick to the same hardware.

Have you considered running two hot machines, running off the same storage (e.g. SAN) ? Is this something your budget would allow?

I did some basic research on this but was still confused as to how it would work. I assume it would work similar to a RAID whereas if one computer died, it would automatically switch over to the hardware of the second computer? All the data would be on the shared storage. Does Windows Server 2008 have the software built in to support this? Can you lead me in the right direction on what this feature is called?

That's pretty much correct. You will use shared storage (usually connected to the server using iSCSI - high speed ethernet). Both servers will have access, and there is a cluster server service on Windows 2008 that knows how to manage it.

Can you tell me what kind of uses you have for the servers? File storage, Exchange, SQL server?

I'm afraid for that kind of budget, all you can really do is get a server that is as similar as possible. A simple NAS will not work for this purpose, it has to be hardware that supports clustering, and that's going to be expensive.

For 2-3K, you need to simply get the closest hardware you can find.To be on the safeside, use Acronis TrueImage or Clonezilla to clone both drives, and see if the drives boot properly in the backup machine.

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